Editorial: The fate of Ventura’s Main Street
Will Main Street in Ventura maintain the Old World charm of sidewalk dining and strolls along a car-free street, or will that pandemic-inspired arrangement go the way of mandatory masks and social-distancing markers?
The closure to traffic of five blocks of Main Street was taken in May 2020, early in the pandemic, as a means to rescue restaurants and businesses downtown by enabling outdoor dining and shopping. It has been temporarily extended since, but the question of whether to make the closure permanent has remained unanswered.
Now, a group of property owners calling themselves Reopen Main Street appears to have forced the issue. It is seeking a court order that would force the city to reopen the streets to vehicle traffic, alleging that the closure has been bad for business.
That is hardly a unanimous view. Other property owners have rallied to retain the configuration known as Main Street Moves, asserting that the increased pedestrian traffic has made the downtown more vibrant — and more profitable for those who operate businesses there.
The de facto downtown plaza also appears to be a hit with the public in general. After it had been in place for about a year and a half, a survey of 10,000 Ventura adults found that more than 80% favored keeping the closure to traffic in place. Other data indicated a decrease in vacancy rates for downtown properties and a significant increase in foot traffic.
The litigious property owners may or may not be right about the merits of their claim about a deleterious effect on commerce, but their lawsuit should speed the resolution of a question that, coming up on four years later, deserves a definitive answer: Will this be a permanent change?
State law spells out a detailed process that cities must follow if sections of streets are to be permanently closed to traffic. It’s called the Pedestrian Mall Act, and it was designed to handle exactly these types of situations — the creation of downtown pedestrian plazas.
It requires extensive public notice and hearings. If a majority of property owners in the area object in writing, the proposal is stopped dead in its tracks. In addition — and this may help explain the motivation for the lawsuit — any property owner can file a claim for damages, and if the claim of financial loss is validated, the city must compensate the owner for that loss.
It is not unlike an eminent domain process, except in this case no property is being condemned or converted to public use. There are likely instances in which a particular type of business is harmed by streets that are closed to vehicles, but the property could be leased instead to a business that would thrive in a pedestrian zone.
There should be no shortage of hard data to demonstrate how downtown merchants are faring: sales tax receipts, bed tax receipts from downtown hotels, building occupancy rates, cell phone data to document levels of foot traffic, the utilization rate of the downtown parking garage.
To be sure, there will be seasonal variations in that data. By definition, outdoor activities are sensitive to the weather. All that rain this winter can’t have been good for outdoor dining. On the other hand, the heat of summer surely helps to attract customers from inland areas to the more temperate coastal climate of Ventura’s downtown.
Just as the effects on property owners and merchants must be considered, so also should the opinions of their customers — in other words, the community at large. If support remains anywhere near the 80% level measured in that fall 2021 survey, the city council must heavily weigh that sentiment.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Editorial: The fate of Ventura’s Main Street
